Thirty Years' War
The era of the '''Thirty Years' War lasted from about 1598 AD until 1651 AD. It began with the Edict of Nantes in 1598 AD, which ended the French Wars of Religion. It then ended with the restoration of monarchy in England in 1651 AD, which ended the brief experiment as a republic after the English Civil War. The Protestant Reformation would meet its bloody conclusion in imperial Germany with the devastating Thirty Years War, that caused the deaths of perhaps 25% of her total population, with losses of up to 50% in some regions. After 1648, religious issues retained political importance, but no longer dominated international alignments. In undermining the authority of the Church, the Reformation made possible the absolute rule of powerful monarchs, notably in France and Russia. Yet in questioning the Church, almost inevitable people began to question the divine right of kings. In the long struggle for representative government, England was at the forefront, emerging from the English Civil War as a parliamentary monarchy, after a brief experiment as a republic. The intellectual basis of the struggle, would be won provided by the Age of Enlightenment in the 18th century. Meanwhile, with the steady decline of Spain's power and prestige, other European nations were quick to dispute their claims to the Americas and the Far East. History Thirty Years’ War in Germany The Thirty Years' War (1618-48) in Holy Roman Empire was the last large-scale religious war of the Protestant Reformation. The compromise of the Peace of Augsburg (1555 AD) created a temporary uneasy peace between the two faiths in imperial Germany for half-a-century. It did not resolve the underlying religious conflict, but simply accept the reality that had emerged since Luther's Ninety-Five Theses; a patchwork of semi-autonomous Protestant and Catholic states or fiefdoms or free-cities, where each German prince took his own decision on the religious question, later epitomized in the phrase, “''he who governs the territory decides its religion''”. From the 1580s the situation steadily deteriorated. Religious extremism had been intensifying across Europe, due to events such as the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, or ongoing Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648) and Anglo-Spanish War (1585–1604). Perhaps a key moment was the Peace of Zsitvatorok (1606) which ended decades of warfare between Germany and the Ottoman Turks. This took away a unifying threat, and gave the two religious groups breathing-room to focus on their internal rivalries. Two years after Zsitvatorok, Protestant princes, fearing a supposed Catholic conspiracy to annihilate German Protestantism, banded together in a defense pact called the Protestant Union under Frederick V of the Rhinelands (d. 1632). Catholic princes promptly responded by forming the Catholic League. Imperial Germany was like a powder-keg just waiting for a spark. , and sometimes the "Third".]] The new crisis gained impetus in 1609, with all eyes on Prague, capital of Bohemia (modern-day Czechia and Slovakia). Part of the Habsburg domain since 1526, it had enjoyed comparative religious tolerance since the end of the Hussite Wars. On becoming Holy Roman Emperor, Matthias I Habsburg (1612-19) gradually gave up direct title to the Habsburg lands to his cousin and designated heir, Ferdinand of Austria (d. 1637). In 1617, Matthias fell ill and granted Bohemia to Ferdinand as well to the dread of the Protestant Bohemians. They had heard tales of his fervent Catholicism as duke of Austria. The cause of what happened next is disputed; either there was some provocation by Ferdinand, or it may have been a pre-emptive strike by Protestant Bohermians. In May 1618, a group of nobles insisted on seeing Ferdinand's representatives in the statehouse in Prague, during which a quarrel broke-out, and the two Catholic officials were thrown out the third-story window to the ground; known as the Second Defenestrations of Prague from the Latin for "out the window". This was the trigger for the Bohemian Revolt (1618-20). It remained a local revolt until the death of Emperor Matthias in March 1619, and Ferdinand was crowned Emperor Ferdinand II Habsburg (1619-37). This forced the Bohemians into a decision; either lay down their arms or risk open war. They went with the latter, and offered the crown of Bohemia to the Protestant prince Frederick V of the Rhinelands. Ferdinand II was able to organize a powerful army against this Protestant upstart, with the bulk of his forces coming from Catholic Bavaria and Habsburg Spain. In contrast, Frederick V received only messages of goodwill, as other Protestant princes had themselves wanted the Bohemian crown. The imperial army under the renowned Bavarian general Johann Tserclaes von Tilly (d. 1632) marched on Prague, and decided the issue in a single brief encounter. The Battle of White Mountain (November 1620), just to the west of the city, lasted only an hour and left the Bohemian rebels utterly crushed. That evening, Frederick V and his family fled from Prague, which the imperial army entered the next day, and executed 47 of the leaders of the revolt; still commemorated today with 47 crosses mark into the pavement of the Old Town Square. Bohemia would become Catholic once again, and remain in Habsburg hands for another three hundred years. Meanwhile, Frederick V was forced into exile in the Netherlands, and his title as prince-elector transferred to Bavaria. This was a serious blow to Protestant ambitions in the region, but only acted to intensify the wider war. Peace proved short-lived, with conflict resuming at the initiation of Denmark. The ambitious Christian IV of Denmark (1588-1648) was also ruler of Schleswig-Holstein (southern Jutland peninsula), a duchy within Holy Roman Empire. His kingdom was not traditionally powerful, but had a reliable revenue stream from taxing shipping between the Baltic and North Sea. Christian IV had good cause to enter the German war, under the guise of defending the Protestant cause: he was keen to extend his territory southwards to the great trading rivers of Elbe and Weser, and had been promised financial backing from the Protestant Netherlands and England to restore Frederick V to his confiscated lands. He also feared his Swedish rival would intervene, if he did not. In May 1625, the Danish army marched into Germany. However Christian IV was an unskilled commander, and had the misfortune to being ranged against one of the greatest generals of his day; Albrecht von Wallenstein (d. 1634). Wallenstein was a minor Bohemian nobleman, who had entered Habsburg service at the outbreak of the Bohemian Revolt, and fought at the White Mountain; he converted to Catholicism in order to advance his career. In the aftermath, he assisted in the confiscation of rebel lands, emerging as a major beneficiary; he was made a duke in 1625. Ferdinand meanwhile wanted to lessen his reliance on Bohemia, and commissioned Wallenstein to raise an army of 25,000 which would be under direct imperial control. Christian IV was first defeated by Wallenstein at the Battle of Dessau Bridge (April 1626), and by Tilly at the Battle of Lutter (August 1626). Together, they then pursued the defeated forces back north, eventually confining Christian IV to his Danish lands. Buoyed by this victory, Emperor Ferdinand II overreached himself. He began to rule by decree, issuing the Edict of Restitution (1629) which demanded that all Protestant lands not specifically ceded in the Peace of Augsburg be restored to the Catholic Church. There was no opportunity for argument, for the imperial edict was brutally enforced by the armies of Wallenstein and Tilly. This caused many moderate Protestant states of the empire, which had kept silent up until now, to feel increasingly threatened by an arbitrary rule against which they had no defense, and ensuring that the war in Germany did not end in 1629. Ferdinand also ordered Wallenstein to capture the port of Stralsund on the Baltic, as the base for a new Catholic fleet. The potential of a Catholic presence on the Lutheran shores of the Baltic persuaded Sweden to enter the German war. Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden (1611-32) was already the veteran of two wars, one against Denmark, and the Livonian War against Russia and Poland-Lithuania. The former was unsuccessful, surrendering Älvsborg into Danish hands, Sweden's only port with unfettered access to the North Sea. The latter denied the Russians access to the Baltic, in a settlement that held until Peter the Great, and ceded to Sweden what is now Latvia, as well as rights to customs revenue from Polish ports. Sweden was now the dominant power in the Baltic. During this time, Gustavus had effected a quiet revolution in the Swedish army. His innovative tactical integration of infantry, cavalry, logistics and especially his use of artillery, made Sweden one of the great powers of Europe in the 17th-century. He laid the foundations of military practice for the next two centuries, with fire power and mobility now the priority on the battlefield. Carl von Clausewitz of Prussia, Napoleon Bonaparte, and George S. Patton were among his many admirers. Gustavus Adolphus marched into Germany in June 1630, landing at Szczecin (in modern-day western Poland). This escalated the conflict into a full-scale European war, for the Swedes were financially backed by the Dutch Netherlands and also France. A pragmatic statesman, Cardinal Richelieu secretly allied Catholic France with Protestant Sweden, alarmed at the growing power of France's old Habsburg rivals. Emperor Ferdinand II was not well placed to face this new crisis. The financial pressures of the previous decade were beginning to mount, and the imperial army had to be dramatically downsized. Moreover, the duke of Bavaria and Catholic League had pressured the emperor into dismissing the ambitious upstart Wallenstein. The imperial army succeeded for some time in confining Gustavus to the region around Szczecin, with the Protestant German princes viewing the Swedes as an unwelcome foreign presence. This began to change when the imperial forces sacked the city of Magdeburg, the only significant Swedish ally thus far. In the single most horrific massacre of the entire Thirty Years' War, a city of almost 25,000 inhabitants was reduced to just 449. The news shocked Germany, and prompted Saxony and Brandenburg to ally with Sweden. With his new allies, Gustavus confronted the imperial army under Tilly at the Battle of Breitenfeld (September 1631). This was the first public demonstration of Gustavus' new tactics. The battle opened with a thunderous two hour artillery exchange. In addition to having almost twice as many cannons, the Swedes fires at least three volleys for each imperial volley. Tilly recognised that the weakness in the Swedish line was the Saxon forces on the right wing. A skewed attack did rout the Saxons, but, rather than exposing the Swedish flank, the Swedes pivoted rapidly in good order and counter-attacked while Tilly's soldiers were still plundering the Saxon baggage. Thereafter the rout of the main Catholic field army was completed in a series of unwelcome surprises: musketeers appeared among lines of infantrymen instead of on the flanks, and cavalry charges suddenly materialized from unexpected quarters. The upper hand had now switched from the Catholic side to the Protestant side, led by Sweden. Gustavus pressed his campaign further south into Catholic Germany. In April, Tilly was defeated again, this time accompanied by his death. In May, Gustavus occupied Bavaria, while a Saxon army crossed into Bohemia. In despair, Ferdinand II reappointed Wallenstein to his post as commander of the imperial army. Wallenstein marched into north Bavaria, threatening Gustavus' supply lines. Gustavus knew that Wallenstein had established a strong entrenched position, but found no other option. The Battle of Lützen (November 1632) was another Protestant victory, though losses were heavy on both sides, and among the death was Swedish king Gustavus Adolphus. Sweden continued in the war under the able general Axel Oxenstierna, but without Gustavus' leadership, the Protestant war effort lost direction. Two years later, Spain sent a fresh army to Germany to bolster the imperial forces at the Battle of Nördlingen (September). This time the Swedes were decisively beaten. Exhaustion among the German princes now at last made a compromise possible. In the Peace of Prague (1635), it was the emperor who made the major concession. Rather than the demand in the Edict of Restitution to restore the religious status quo that prevailed in 1555, now the date was the very recent 627; broadly speaking this protected the Protestant heartland in northern Germany, but not those in the south such as Bohemia. If the war had only involved the German states, the agreement at Prague might well have ended it. But France was not satisfied, feeling threatened by the renewed strength of the Habsburgs, with the Spanish Habsburgs actively supporting to their Austrian cousins. Sweden's ability to continue the war alone appeared doubtful, and in 1635 Richelieu made the decision to enter into direct war against both Austria and Spain. The warfare thus rumbled on for several more years, but it did so in a somewhat haphazard manner, with numerous local encounters across Europe. There were certain significant turning points. In 1638, a French victory at the Battle of Breisach pushed the Habsburg armies back from the borders of France. In 1640, Portugal seizes the opportunity to reassert its independence from Spain, diverting her attention from supporting the emperor and war with the Netherlands. In 1642, the Swedish army regained the initiative in the German campaign after victory at the Second Battle of Breitenfeld. May 1643 saw an important French victory at the Battle of Rocroi in Spanish Belgium, which ended forever the idea of Spanish military invincibility, and allowed the French to feel more secure. That same year, Sweden declared war on Denmark further complicating the conflict. By now all sides were eager for a settlement, including France which was slowly descending into the domestic crisis of The Fronde. In July 1543, delegates to a peace congress gathered in Westphalia. It was the first of many deliberations, spread over five years, further complicated by the fact that warfare was continuing. Over the course of 1648, the various parties in the conflict signed a series of treaties called the Peace of Westphalia, effectively ending the Thirty Years’ War. The main winners from the settlement were Sweden and France. Sweden gained valuable Baltic territories, much of it from Denmark, and continued its golden age as a European great power, at least until the Great Northern War (1700–21). France received the territory of Alsace-Lorraine from imperial Germany, and cemented her position as the greatest power in Europe. The full independence of the Dutch Netherlands was at last confirmed by Spain, leaving it free to concentrate on its enormously successful commercial and imperial enterprises. Switzerland, which had long been effectively autonomous within imperial Germany, was also formally acknowledged as independent. The main loser of the peace was the Holy Roman Emperor, by now Ferdinand III Habsburg (1637-57). On the religious issue, the Peace of Augsburg was reconfirmed, giving German princes freedom to choose their religion. Moreover, the emperor no longer claimed to be the ruler of German principalities. They were recognised as independent states with the right to engage in their own international diplomacy. The future struggles of the Germany states would not be against the anachronistic Holy Roman Emperor, but among themselves; Prussia would eventually emerge as Austria's chief rival. The war had consequences outside Europe too, as the nations extended their rivalry to overseas colonies in the Americas, Africa, and Asia. Meanwhile the Thirty Years' War devastated Germany. For thirty years armies marched to and fro across the country, all plundering to feed and fund themselves at the expense of the local population. At least 8 million people died, about 25% of the total population of Germany, rising to 66% in some regions. More people died in the Thirty Years' War than the Napoleonic War and American Civil War combined. The war killed soldiers and civilians alike, whether directly from conflict or famine or diseases such as typhus and dysentery that invariably followed armies about. Others died from religious purges or simple banditry. Among the social traumas abetted by the war was a major outbreak of witch hunting. The war also had more subtle consequences. It was the end of the era of major religious wars, the last large-scale bloodshed accompanying the Protestant Reformation; religious issues retained political importance after 1648, but no longer dominated international alignments. The frustration of Habsburg ambitions in Germany had been the work of outsiders; France, Sweden, the Netherlands, and Denmark. Here was the real sign of the future: the age of Realpolitik ''and the European ''Balance of Power was beginning. Louis XIII and Richelieu in France Henry IV had gone a long way toward restoring royal authority, by the time he was succeeded by his nine-year-old son, Louis XIII Bourbon (1610-43). His mother, Marie de' Medici (d. 1642), acted as regent during his minority. Her rule was lax, capricious, and widely unpopular, especially due to her foreign policy. Reversing France's longstanding anti-Habsburg stance, she arranged for young Louis to marry Anne of Austria, daughter of Philip III of Spain and niece of Ferdinand II of imperial Germany; a marriage of significance in the later War of Spanish Succession. The marriage was only briefly happy; she suffered several miscarriage, before finally giving the king the heir he sought after 23-years. Henri of Condé, the second in line to the throne, launched two unsuccessful rebellions against the queen, and Marie's regency was finally brought to an end in a palace coup; she was exiled from Paris. In the end, her main contribution was employing a very talented minister; Cardinal Richelieu '(d. 1642). Born Armand du Plessis, he came to the attention of the government in 1614, when he presented the eloquent final address of the clergy at a meeting of the French parliament (Estates-General). He became a secretary of state in 1616, but was exiled along with Marie the next year. Richelieu began his climb back to power by mediating a reconciliation between mother and son, after she tried to lead an aristocratic rebellion against the king. By 1624 he was the dominant figure in the government, a position he would hold until his death 19-years-later. Cardinal Richelieu proved an indefatigable servant of the French crown, intent on securing absolute obedience to the monarchy and on raising its international prestige. Strong centralised rule had been attempted by Francis I, then improved upon by Henry IV, and now, thanks to Richelieu, successfully achieved by Louis XIII. To weaken the power of the aristocracy, he systematically destroyed the castles of defiant lords and denounced the use of private armies, thus stripping them of the ability to rebel. Moreover, the French parliament summoned by Queen Marie in 1614 proved to be the last for almost two centuries, until the fateful assembly of 1789; unlike in England, the French king could dispense new taxation without the consent of parliament. As a result, to have influence nobles now needed to be at court, under the eye of the king and his minister. In the course of strengthening royal power, Richelieu also came into conflict with the Huguenots (French Protestants). Many Catholics regarded the Huguenots as an enemy to be destroyed. Richelieu agreed up to a point. He believed that their right under the Edict of Nantes to maintain armed fortresses weakened the king’s position. In 1622, Louis XIII led a campaign against Huguenots who had supported the rebellions of Henri of Condé, that resulted in dismantling the fortifications of the Huguenot stronghold of Montpellier. Then in 1525, a minor Protestant revolt provided the pretext for an even more ambitious campaign. In 1627, Richelieu personally led the royal army to besiege the formidable Huguenot fortress of La Rochelle. Despite at attempt by Charles I of England to intervene, the citadel capitulated in 1628, after holding out for more than a year. In the resulting Peace of Alais (1629), the Cardinal abolished Huguenot political and protection privileges that had been granted in the Edict of Nantes, but left them freedom to worship; complete victory for Catholics would follow under King Louis XIV. Richelieu was also a famous patron of the arts and learning. He was elected principal of Sorbonne University in 1622, which he renovated and expanded. He sent his agents far and wide in search of books for his unrivalled library, which his will specified should be open to scholars; the library was eventually transferred to the Sorbonne. He oversaw the construction of the Palais-Royal in Paris, which now serves as the French Ministry of Culture. Furthermore, King and Cardinal are remembered for establishing the ''Académie Française, the pre-eminent learned society responsible for matters pertaining to the French language. Cardinal Richelieu taxed the country hard, prompting several peasant uprisings that were brutally crushed. He also took a great interest in economic matters: he encouraged economic self-sufficiency; granted privileges to companies that established French colonies in the Americas, Africa, and the East; and created a powerful navy to protect trading and colonial interests, which by 1642 had 63 warships. On the basis of these policies, Richelieu was able to pursue an increasingly ambitious foreign. His chief aim was to boost the French king's international prestige, and to secure France against the threat of the Habsburg dynasty in Spain and Austria. In 1624, he decided to subsidise the Dutch to fight against the Spanish in the ongoing Dutch War of Independence (1568–1648). In 1629, when the Austrian emperor seemed to have the upper hand in the Thirty Years' War, he allied France with Gustavus Adolphus of Sweden. Richelieu was denounced by many as a traitor to the Catholic cause for openly aligned France with Protestant powers. By 1635, Gustavus was dead, the Spanish were campaigning in the Dutch Netherlands near France's northern border, and the Austrian emperor was about to make peace with his German princes. Richelieu decides that it is time for overt action, declaring war on both Spain and Austria. Military action was at first disastrous for the French, with a number of defeats though none decisive. The war was still going on when Cardinal Richelieu dies in 1642, to be followed by Louis XIII in 1643. Had they lived until the Treaty of Westphalia, they would have know the great strides made in boosting French prestige. The treaty gave France territorial rights to Alsace-Lorraine, and reflected a subtle shift in the European balance of power. By the end of the century, the nation that everyone else feared would no longer be Spain or Austria, but France under Louis XIV. English Civil War When Queen Elizabeth I Tudor died, despite a bountiful reign, one thing she failed to provide was an heir. The Virgin Queen was the last surviving child of Henry VIII, the only son of Henry VII to reach adulthood. The undisputed next in line to the throne was her cousin, the great-grandson of Henry VII's eldest daughter Margaret, James VI Stuart of Scotland. Unlike his Catholic mother Mary Queen of Scots, James had been safely brought up as a member of the Protestant Church of Scotland. His claim was clear, but Elizabeth refused to acknowledge him as her successor until her deathbed. No doubt Elizabeth reasoned that an element of uncertainty would keep her Scottish cousin on his best behaviour. She was proved right. A skilled politician, James was in secret correspondence with the queen's first minister, Robert Cecil (son of William), during the last two years of Elizabeth's reign, and avoided any actions that might alarm his future English subjects. As a result his succession to the English throne as '''James I Stuart (1603-25 AD) went as smoothly as if he were Elizabeth's own son, rather than the ruler of a kingdom where hostility to England had long been the norm. James united the kingdoms of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland for the first time in history. Despite his best efforts to create a new imperial throne of Great Britain, obstinate opposition on both sides of the border made this impossible: the Scots saw the risk of becoming like Ireland, a kingdom in name, but a subject nation in practice; and the English viewed the Scots as barbarous, poor, and eager to snap up English jobs and wealth. England and Scotland thus continued as distinct and separate kingdoms under the personal union of a shared monarch; at least until the Acts of Union (1707). The Stuart Period (1603-1714) in England can be characterised by three major themes, each of them evident from early in James' reign. One was was the beginning of the British Empire, an area the new Stuart regime could claim great success. James supported the efforts that succeeded in planting the first permanent English settlements overseas, Jamestown in Virginia (1607), and Bermuda (1609). Colonial achievements eastwards by the East India Company were equally impressive. The second theme was two separate but intertwining religious struggles within England: the Roman Catholic minority who sought freedom of worship; and a battle for the soul of the Protestant Church of England (Anglicans). The Elizabethan Settlement established a permanent Protestant ascendancy, but not without compromise. The queen had sought religious peace rather than rigid dogma, and the Church of England wound-up having loose discipline and a semi-Catholic structure, with 2 archbishops and 26 bishops. In Scotland, the Reformation had followed a very different course. The Protestant nobles who deposed Mary had pursued Reformation to the hilt, establishing Presbyterianism which widely decentralised the church's structure and abolished bishops. In England, the example of the Scottish church helped the growth of a reform movement known as Puritanism, who saw the English Reformation as a deed half done. The Puritans were rigid and austere, emphasised private Bible study, were fanatically anti-Catholic, and abhorred the loose morality of corrupt bishops. Because of the tactful manner in which he had handled similar tensions in Scotland, all side had high hopes of James I when he ascended the English throne in 1603. James's attitude towards Catholics was more moderate than his predecessor, but, pressured by his Privy Council, made no moves to end their persecution. This provoked a small group of disappointed Catholics to take matters into their own hands; the Gunpowder Plot '''( 1605). The conspirators attempt to blow-up parliament failed, and fatally damage their own cause; the event confirmed, for centuries to come, an anti-Catholic obsession in the English national psyche. The second theme of the Stuart Period was the relationship between the king and parliament. Where his cousin Elizabeth had been a pragmatist, James I expected parliament to be obedient, as it was in Scotland; though the Scottish parliament was superficially similar to the English, it had little real power. The initial euphoria of James's succession ended with his difficulties with parliament in 1604, which granted him neither a full union nor adequate revenue. The difficulties owed more to mutual misunderstanding than conscious enmity. Where parliament thought that it was being generous, the new taxes still weren't coming close to meeting the financial needs of the state. At the heart of the issue was that one of the ways Queen Elizabeth had courted favour, was by keeping taxes ridiculously low, and borrowing heavily to fund her wars with Spain and in Ireland. King James inherited a kingdom with minimal royal revenue, lots of debt, and subjects conditioned to low taxes. This was further exhausted by high inflation throughout Europe caused by the large influx of Spanish bullion from the Americas; prices had risen by 500% over the course of the 16th-century. On the king's side, James had a taste for absolutism, that was further fueled by the powerful example across the Channel of Louis XIII of France. In Scotland, he had been able to rule almost as an absolute monarch, with parliamentary approval of taxation was merely an expectation. In England, it was a settled legal right enshrined in Magna Carta (1215). It should be noted from the outset that the English parliament was in no way a body that represented "the people"; voting-rights were restricted on property ownership to less than 20% of the population, and membership of parliament even more so. Yet it did represent something more democratic than almost any other European state, apart from perhaps the Dutch Republic. As James' reign progressed, his government faced growing financial problems, but he was unable to break the impasse: only the king can summon a parliament, so parliament was powerless without him; and parliament can raise the necessary taxes, so the king was powerless without it. So James attempted to find other ways to raise funds, including selling peerages, demanding gifts, establishing royal trade monopolies such as one on soap; he even tried and failed to marry his son to a Spanish princess for the dowry. In 1614, negotiations with parliament came to nothing, with the members in no mood to discuss anything other than their own grievances; the king dissolved it after two months with not a single bill passed. Seven years elapse before James calls another in 1621, but this time parliament found other ways to fight back. They put on trial before parliament purchasers of peerages or monopolies; their biggest catch was Lord Chancellor Francis Bacon. When James' son '''Charles I Stuart (1625-49) ascended to the throne, parliament and the king were set on course for a direct collision. It was customary that in the first parliament of a new reign, the king would be granted basic taxes for life to finance the routine organs of government; tonnage and poundage tax on the import of goods. However, the first parliament of Charles' reign, in May 1625, decided to grant him these basic taxes for only one year. This unprecedented act was probably a manoeuvre to force the new king to respond to their grievances, but Charles took it as a slap in the face and responded by dissolving parliament. For three years he kept the crown solvent by collecting basic taxes without any official parliamentary grant, imposing forced loans on nobles and counties, and imprisoning anyone who refuse to pay. A number of events compounded a growing loss of faith in Charles as a king to be trusted: widely publicised court cases against forced loans, such as the Five Knights' Case; an embarrassingly inept attempt to support French Huguenot at La Rochelle led by the king's favourite, the duke of Buckingham; and the king's marriage to a French Catholic. By 1628, it was clear that the king and parliament were going to have to come to some sort of understanding. The new session of parliament, including 27 members who had been imprisoned for refusing forced loads, assembled with a sense of profound wariness. It was proposed to grant the king five new taxes, in return for a restatement of ancient liberties known as the Petition of Right (1628); taxation was illegal without parliamentary approval, freedom from arrest without due process of law, and restrictions on billeting troops without consent. Charles accepted the petition, which should have marked the dawn of a new era of political peace. However, in August 1628 the duke of Buckingham, a favourite of Charles and hated by parliament, was stabbed to death by a disgruntled officer who had been passed over for promotion. The death embittered Charles, while the embolden parliament decided to press for further reform. In early 1639, weary of parliament's carping, Charles once again dissolved the assembly, which broke-up in pandemonium; he would not call another for 11-years. Thus began the personal rule of Charles I. If the kind wanted to rule without parliament, then he needed new ingenious ways to fund his administration. The most notorious was Ship Money. In medieval England during wartime every coastal county owed the king one ship (or the money to provide one) for the defence of the realm. In 1634, Charles revived Ship Money under the pretext of an alleged problem with pirates; a year later he extended it to inland counties. Opposition to this non-parliamentary taxation steadily grew, with the prosecutions of John Hampden for non-payment providing a platform for popular resistance. Things were made worse by Charles' attitude to the sensitive issue of religion. Together with Archbishop Laud of Canterbury, he launched an effort to bring some uniformity to worship across all the king's domains. The enforcement of the Book of Common Prayer in England was unpopular, especially when Laud began prosecuting those radical Protestants who resisted; it did not help that during this same period Charles' wife was practicing Catholicism right out in the open. The ill-conceived and ill-fated decision to extend this religious policy to Scotland in July 1637 would mark the beginning of the end for king Charles; the Bishops' War (1639-45). Scottish Presbyterianism was laced with a healthy distrust of the state, so even the most benign reforms were going to be met with some resistance. With the kind of wholesale reform that Charles and Laud had in mind, Scotland went from resistance to open rebellion in just seven-months. After months of widespread sporadic riots, the Scots began to organise a formal nationwide resistance called the National Covenant. Charles responded, not by rethinking his policy, but by mustering an army to enforce his will; about 15,000 men was all he could afford without parliament. However, upon marching over Scottish border at Berwick-upon-Tweed, he found a Scottish Covenanter army waiting to meet him. Rather than engage, Charles negotiated a truce in a bid to gain time before launching a new military campaign. The king had been barely scraping by financially, he studiously avoided getting sucked into a war. He now had no choice but to call another English parliament. Charles underestimated the anger that had grown-up during the 11-years of personal rule. The parliament that assembled in April 1640 was dismissed after only three week when it refused to grant funds for the revolt against Scotland. However, a resumption of the Bishops' War forced Charles to summon parliament once again in November 1640. It later became known as the Long Parliament because it would not be officially dissolved until March 1660, after the English Civil War. The members who assembled were ready with a reckoning with Charles, and first vented their frustration on two members of the Privy Council deemed to have led the king astray; archbishop Laud and the earl of Strafford, Charles’ lord deputy of Ireland. Laud was impeached as the architects of the Scottish fiasco, while Strafford was tried and convicted of treason on the dubious charge of planning to bring an Irish army into England in support of the king. Charles' position was so weak that he was forced to accept major concessions: the king signed Strafford's death warrant; Ship Money was outlawed; and parliaments must meet regularly whether the king called for it or not. Then in October 1641 news came from Ireland that changed everything. The Irish Catholic elite were alarmed by this crisis in England. They'd lost land and power but at least under Charles there was a degree of religious tolerance. Now faced with a militant protestant parliament, they rebelled; the Irish Confederate Wars (1641-1653). Stories of atrocities committed by Irish rebels soon arrived, that were usually wildly exaggerated. But given English prejudice against Catholics in general, and the Irish in particular, everyone was ready to believe the worst. Confronted by a crisis, parliamentary unity against the king began to crack. With the bit between their teeth, radical members led by John Pym (d. 1643) prepared in the Grand Remonstrance, a long list of their grievances against the king. But recent events had convinced many moderate members that upheaval was getting out of hand. Showing the now sharp divide in parliament, the Grand Remonstrance was passed by only a narrow majority of 11 votes, and the move to have it published failed; moderates were further offended, when Pym leaked the document to the underground printers. This glimpse of support tempted the king into an impetuous and ill-advised move. He accused five members of parliament, probably correctly, of colluding with Scottish rebels. On 4 January 1642, Charles marched into the Houses of Parliament with an armed guard to arrest the members personally. To make matters worse, forewarned of the king’s intention, Pym and the others had slipped away. Charles asked the Speaker where the MPs had fled, to which he famously replied, "May it please Your Majesty, I have neither eyes to see, nor tongue to speak in this place, but as the House is pleased to direct me, whose servant I am here." Fearing the parliamentary directed mobs of London, Charles and his family left the capital for northern England six days later; he would not return to London until 1649 for his trial and execution. Neither the king nor parliament wanted civil war, but no one was willing to back down an inch. During the early months of 1642, efforts at negotiations were full of unreasonable demands, barely concealed paranoia about the intentions of the other side, and as much about being able to blame the other side for the armed conflict. It didn't help that moderate members of parliament steadily slipped out of London to join the king's side, which only had the effect of skewing parliament decidedly towards the more radical. Meanwhile both sides took steps to organise their support. Parliament passed the Militia Ordinance claimed the right to raise a volunteer army (traditionally known as the Rounheads), despite the fact that no legislation could become law until it received the royal assent. The king raised his own army (Cavaliers) through the equally legally dubious means of the old medieval feudal law. By the time the war officially began when the king raised his standard at Nottingham in August 1642, fighting had already started on a small scale in many parts of the country; Charles had tried to seize the major military arsenal at Hull in April, but to his dismay found the city-gates closed to him. At the start of the civil war the king controlled roughly the Midlands, Wales, the West Country and northern England, as well as cathedral cities. Parliamentary strength resided above all in London, a critical strategic advantage since it was by far the largest city in England, providing both the funds and manpower for battle. There was also strong support in the other major cities and ports, together with the more commercially advanced towns of the southeast, as well as the English navy. However, the geographical division of a royalist north and west, and a parliamentary south-east is too broad a generalization. The most striking characteristic of the conflict is the split loyalty which often divides counties, towns, villages and families. Scotland's involvement in the war would be somewhat erratic; although religion aligned the Scots with parliament, they feared being sidelined by an increasingly radical English parliament, as much as they feared a despotic king. The Irish rebellion still loomed over all of this, but both sides largely ignored the desperate calls for reinforcements from English forces across the Irish Sea. Militarily, the early years of the English Civil War (1642-51) were chaotic mess. At this time, England had no standing army, and, aside from a few intrepid adventurers who had privately served on the continent, the generation that waged the war had no military experience to speak of; and it would show. This was clearly demonstrated in the first major engagement between Cavaliers and Roundheads; the Battle of Edgehill (October 1642). The army of king Charles attempted to march on London to quickly force a decisive confrontation, while parliamentary forces followed suit. But with neither side scouted properly, the two armies didn't know where the other side was, until unexpectedly finding themselves right on top of each other. Edhehill should have been a decisive royalist victory, but the maddening indiscipline of Charles’ nephew Prince Rupert (d. 1682), meant it was merely a mauling. After the battle, the king resumed his march on London, but moved so cautiously that parliament was able to organise a makeshift but strong defence, prompting Charles to withdraw to Oxford, which would serve as his base for the rest of the war. From the spring of 1643 the war widened. In general, the early part of the war went well for the royalists. Victory at the Battle of Adwalton Moor (June 1643) bought firm control of Yorkshire, while another at Roundway Down (July 1643), virtually destroyed the parliamentary forces in the west and gained Bristol. But then the royalist advantage was thrown away with the ill-advised decision to besiege Gloucester in the midlands. A turning point came when parliamentary relief force raised the siege, and drove-off the royalist at the First Battle of Newbury (September 1643). This modest success convinced the Scottish Covenanters that the civil war was not a hopeless cause, who joined the parliamentary cause against king Charles. The arrival of a 20,000 strong Scottish army turned the tide in the north. With their help, parliamentary forces under Lord Thomas Fairfax (d. 1671) won a smashing victory at the Battle of Marston Moor (July 1644), gaining control of York and much of northern England. But this time it was parliament that threw away the advantage. In the west, a shambolic campaign ended in the surrender of a 6,000 strong parliamentary army at the Battle of Lostwithiel (September 1644) in Cornwall. In the midlands, a parliamentary army almost twice his size, practically force king Charles from Oxford into undertaking an extensive field campaign, with every chance of being defeated and captured. However, the king conducted a skilful war of manoeuvre, helped by his enemy's mistakes, that ended in victory at Battle of Cropredy Bridge (June 1644) and an inconclusive clash at the Second Battle of Newbury (October 1644) This string of setbacks convinced parliament that it needed a professional standing army, or it was going to lose the war. The New Model Army completely overhauled their military structure. It was to be properly funded, with first call on all available resources. Its soldiers were to be full-time paid professionals liable for service anywhere in the country, rather than part-time militias tied to a particular area. And the army was put in the hands of professional officers whose only goal was to win the war, rather than politicians angling for a political settlement. Indeed members of parliament were disbarred from leading it by the Self-Denying Ordinance. The man chosen as commander-in-chief of the New Model Army was Thomas Fairfax, an adept and talented general who proved totally up to the job of moulding it into a well-disciplined fighting force. Fairfax would in time be overshadowed by his subordinate, Oliver Cromwell (d. 1658). Cromwell was a minor noble, a committed Puritan, and an eminently capable cavalry commander, who fought at the defeated at Edgehill and played a crucial role at the victory at Marston Moor. He was also a member of parliament, albeit a minor if outspoken backbencher, but one of the only men granted an exemption from the Self-Denying Ordinance. Oliver Cromwell was thus in a unique position, well placed to play an active role in both stands of the civil war; the military and political conflict with the king. Meanwhile in 1645, king Charles was eager to bring the just forming New Model Army into a decisive confrontation quickly. The idea was to lure Fairfax into battle by seizing the parliamentary city of Leicester, but the king soon found himself caught in his own trap, with his army plague by desertions as soldiers plundered the city and went home with their spoils. At the Battle of Naseby (June 1645), the decisive engagement of the first phase of the English Civil War, the king faced with retreating north with Fairfax close behind, or giving battle despite now being heavily outnumbers, decided to stand and fight; it would prove to be his undoing. At Naseby, cavalry proved decisive. The royalist cavalry under Prince Rupert prevailed on the left flank, and the parliamentary cavalry under Cromwell prevailed on the right. However, while Rupert continued to pursue his foe, Cromwell called a disciplined halt and charged the royalist centre. Charles fled the field as the battle turned into a rout; he lost the bulk of his veteran soldiers and officers, as well as most of his artillery, and would never again field a royalist army of comparable quality. Parliament meanwhile gained much support for fighting the war to a finish. Within a year, the first phase of the civil war ended in a Parliamentarian military victory: Bristol and the west fell in September 1645; the royalist capital in Oxford and the midlands in April 1646; and Charles himself surrendered to Scottish Covenanters at Newark in May 1646. After nine months of negotiations, the Scots finally arrived at an agreement with the English parliament, to hand over the king, in return for the repayment of their war debts. For four years the political divisions in England had been held in check by the military emergency. But the king’s defeat released all restraints. In Westminster, factions formed around the religious poles: a majority of members were Presbyterians, wishing to see church uniformity along Scottish lines, and wide-ranging political reform; while a minority were Independents, '''wanting freedom of Protestant worship and fairly modest reforms. At this point neither faction thought the civil war had been about deposing the king, and expected a negotiated settlement. Oliver Cromwell himself was an Independent, and the struggle increasingly took on the character of a clash between parliament and the New Model Army. As relations between the two groups became bitter, the army seized control of both king Charles and London, causing ten leading Presbyterians to flee the capital. The resulting negotiations, known as the Putney Debates (October 1647), threw-up some pretty radical and revolutionary ideas, notably from the Leveller movement which sought to bring the king to trial, abolish the nobility, and extend voting-rights to all adult males (universal suffrage); this was territory that would not be revisited for another century-and-a-half until the French Revolution. Meanwhile, parliament was facing growing social unrest out in the counties. In order to fight the civil war, parliament had been force to levy hefty taxes and lock-up dissenters without due process of law; basically everything it had railed against about Charles' personal rule. By November, king Charles determined that it would be in his best interests to escape, and play-off these factions against one another. He fled Hampton Court, and wound-up on the Isle of Wight. There, he stoked the fears of the Scots that they would be sidelined by an increasingly radical Puritan parliament. Their invasion of England on his behalf in early 1648 sparked the second phase of the civil war, with royalist uprisings in many parts of the kingdom and some unpaid parliamentary soldiers switching to the king's side. Parliament was no more popular at the time than Charles I: taxes were arbitrary and high, and their treatment of dissidents was despotic. A crucial factor in the war was the king's alliance with the Scots. Ever stubborn, Charles' offer was far from generous and Scotland moved south with a mere 10,000 men. In a campaign where everything went wrong for the royalist cause, Fairfax and Cromwell suppressed the unrest in the New Model Army, and delivered a crushing defeat to the Scots at the Battle of Preston (August 1648). With the news of Preston, the royalist cause evaporated with it. Charles's action in triggering the renewal of civil war, hardened attitudes in the army and divided parliament. After a period of indecision, Cromwell finally approved a dramatic coup d'état; '''Pride's Purge, named for the commander of the operation, Colonel Thomas Pride. On 6 December 1648, three regiments of the New Model Army surrounded parliament, and denied admission to some 200 moderate members. The much reduced Rump Parliament then undertook the trial of the king for treason for waging war against parliament. Charles I refused to recognise the court, not without some justification. Parliament generally had 450 members, which had been purged of royalists by the civil war. More than half of this purged parliament had been itself purged by Pride's Purge. On 27 January 1649, the king was found guilty by 67 commissioners, although only 59 agreed to sign the death warrant, including Oliver Cromwell. Three days later, King Charles I met his death with great dignity on a hastily erected scaffold in the yard of the Palace of Whitehall, where he was beheading with one clean stroke. On the very day of the execution, parliament declared England to be a Republic; the Commonwealth of England (1649-53). In the coming weeks, both the House of Lords and the monarchy were formally abolished, and parliament elected a strong executive arm of the government, with Cromwell as the chairman; he was given the title Lord Protector in 1653, or to his critics “''king in all but name''”. In August 1649, Cromwell was finally able to turn his attention to the situation in Ireland. In one way these struggles were a luxury. The English could indulge them because they lived in an island-state where no foreign intruder was ever more than occasionally threatening. Cromwell in Ireland The Protestant Plantation of Ulster that had followed the revolt of O’Neill and O’Donnell between 1594 and 1603, caused alarm for the Catholic elite in Ireland; by 1640, 70% of all land was still in the hands of the Gaelic-Irish and Norman-Irish. At least under Charles I there was a degree of religious tolerance, but as the clash between the king and parliament escalated the alarm grew. Faced with the prospect of a militant Puritan English parliament, Ireland rebelled. The uprising in October 1641 was poorly planned and betrayed by informants, and failed to seize Dublin, centre of English control in Ireland. With this failure, the rebellion descended into anarchy. In Ulster, the Protestant population was settled on the best land with lower rents, but were far from the majority and the Catholic population seized the opportunity to settle old scores. Some four-thousand Ulster Protestants were killed in sectarian massacres, with many thousands more were expelled from their homes. In one notorious incident, more than one-hundred Protestant inhabitants of Portadown were taken captive and then herded off a bridge into the icy cold waters of the River Bann to died. The killings of 1641 had a powerful psychological impact on the Protestant settlers, and ensured that when the English government response came it would be savage. News pamphlets of the day took what was undoubtedly a serious rebellion with genuine abuse of the Protestant population and turned into an alleged armageddon. Protestant reprisals and Catholic counter-reprisals continued until the summer of 1642, when the Catholic elite reasserted control. For the next seven years, more than two-thirds of the country was in the bands of the rebels as the Confederate Ireland (1642-52), outside the Protestant controlled Cork, Dublin, Carrickfergus and Derry. In the English Civil War, Confederate Ireland allied with the royalists, allowing Charles I to withdraw English troops from Ireland to fight against parliament. Oliver Cromwell and the New Model Army arrived in Ireland in August 1649, landing in Dublin, which had remained loyal to Parliament. Cromwell's clear policy was to terrorise the population into submission. The first town to fall was fortified town of Drogheda, garrisoned by royalist troops and Irish Confederates. With a plentiful supply of artillery, after a week-long siege, Cromwell's forces breached the walls protecting the city. When the garrison still refused to surrender, Cromwell issued his infamous directive to kill everyone still under arms. During the successful assault on the city, almost the entire garrison, as well as any Catholic priests found were put to death; about 2800 people. The carnage of Drogheda, was repeated a month later at Wexford. With these examples in mind, several towns surrendered without resistance, but others held out. Kilkenny, the capital of Confederate Ireland fell under siege in March. In April 1650, Cromwell laid siege to Clonmel, one of the last major centres of resistance. Although he wound-up taking the city after a three week siege, it came at a significant cost, with the New Model Army drawn into a clever trap that killed a thousand men in one hour. After Clonmel, Cromwell himself was called back to England, entrusting the campaign to his son-in-law Henry Ireton. It would take a further two years before the whole of Ireland was back under control, after a savage scorched-earth campaign that brought famine and plague to the country. By 1653, a new phase of plantation began that would change Ireland irrevocably. Almost all Catholic held land outside of the barren province of Connaught in the west was confiscated; in Irish popular memory, they must "go to Hell or to Connacht", although whether this famous phrase was ever uttered is questionable. In 1640, about 70% of the land in Ireland was in the hands of the Catholic Irish. By the end of the 1650s, the figure was only about 22%. Across the country a new Protestant ruling class was being installed; the so-called Protestant Ascendency (1650-1829). The Restoration would complicate matters in Ireland yet again. Charles II redressed some of the injustice done to Irish Catholics, with the Act of Explanation (1665) restoring a third of the Cromwellian land-seizures, although it mainly benefited the Norman Irish. Catholic hopes were raised even higher under his successor, James II, only to be dashed again in 1688 by the Glorious Revolution in Ireland. Oliver Cromwell has become a particular figure of hatred in Irish history, and whether his reputation is deserved remains much debated; there are certainly strong traces of guilt and self-justification in Cromwell's own letters on the campaign. Commonwealth and Restoration in England Cromwell was recalled from Ireland in May 1650, in order to deal with the arrival in Scotland of the eldest son of the executed king, Charles II. Charles II had spent the civil war in the Netherlands, appealing for continental support, but finding none in the wake of the Thirty Years' War. In June 1650, he landed in Scotland having made another alliance with the Scots. Cromwell was determine to nip this latest phase of the civil war in the bud, and in July 1650 invaded Scotland. The campaign in Scotland proved difficult, with the Scots harassing the English supply-lines and soon leaving Cromwell bogged down near Dunbar. If the Scots had just waited, the New Model Army would probably have been forced to withdraw from Scotland, but they decided to do battle. The Battle of Dunbar (September 1650) was probably Cromwell's finest hour, routing a Scottish army almost twice as large, and soon took Edinburgh. Yet the Scots regrouped, and in July 1651, Charles II made the ill-advised decision to invade England with his Scottish army; this was almost certainly a trap laid by Cromwell. Charles hoped to find royalist support in England, but with the nation war-weary was sorely disappointed. Now he was the one in enemy territory with his supply-lines harassed by English cavalry. Cromwell finally caught-up with them and decisively defeated Charles and the Scottish army at the Battle of Worcester (September 1651). Charles II himself managed to escape to the continent, after famously hiding in an oak tree at Boscobel. Worcester mercifully brought the English Civil War to an end. By the end of 1651, Oliver Cromwell was back in London and able to finally play a full role in parliament again. He was not best pleased with what he saw there: factional infighting, self-interest and little progress on political or religious reforms. There was also a marked reluctance to stand for re-election, with the Rump Parliament having by now sat for over a decade. There was possibly some political justification in this, as the chaos sown by free elections during the French Revolution would show. However, the New Model Army was increasingly dissatisfied with parliament over various issues, and Cromwell eventually sided with the army. In April 1653, Cromwell forcibly devolved the Rump Parliament with the use of the army, ending his famous speech: “''You have sat too long for any good you have been doing lately... Depart, I say; and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!” When the members protested, Cromwell called in a battalion of armed troops to clear the chamber. In its place, a 140 man provisional assembly was hand-picked by the Cromwell and the army, with Cromwell as Lord Protector of the Commonwealth for life, ruling in conjunction with an an executive council of state; this was undoubtedly a military coup. The dissolution of the Rump Parliament ultimately proved the undoing of England's experiment with Republican government, for Cromwell found it no easier to divest himself of power to a legitimate government, than the Rump had. During the next five years, there were a series of constitutional experiments that attempted a peaceful transfer of power, without delivering England to the defeated royalists or to victorious and intolerant Puritans. Yet, after the bitterly divisive civil war with profound enmity between factions, a viable constitution proved impossible. In the aftermath of royalist insurrections in various parts of the country in 1655, the country was divided into eleven districts, each commanded by a major general; unmistakably military government. In 1657, a powerful faction in the assembly came to an astonishing conclusion; the Humble Petition suggested that Cromwell himself should become king. After some deliberation he chose to refuse, but accepted the right now to select his own successor. Remarkably, regicide England was not treated as a pariah by the monarchies of Europe, and in fact Cromwell agreed an alliance with France in her hostility with Spain. This is in sharp contrast to almost all other revolutions, where opportunistic foreign enemies would invariably try to take advantage of the situation; obvious examples are the French Revolution and Russian Revolution. In the end, the English Republic could only be held together by Cromwell himself, with his blend of pragmatism and integrity, and the intense devotion of the troops. On his death in September 1658, he was succeeded by his eldest son Richard. Richard Cromwell was affable and well-liked, but had no political or military experience, and proved ill-equipped for the role of Lord Protector. All the old hostilities between parliament and the New Model Army were quickly unleashed of England. In April 1659, the army surrounded parliament and forcibly dissolved it; essentially another military coup. In an unsavoury deal, Richard Cromwell was then forced to resign his position and the Rump Parliament was recalled to power, having been dismissed 1653. Yet the army and the Rump found it no easier to appease factional hostility. Discontent with the Commonwealth of England was now at an all-time high. In January 1660, George Monck, a close colleague of Oliver Cromwell throughout the civil war and then commander of the English forces in Scotland, decided to intervene. He formed an alliance with old retired Thomas Fairfax, and crossed the border with his army and slowly marched on London, incorporating detachments of the New Model Army on his way. Reaching London in early February, Monck's stated intention was to restore the power and authority of a free parliament. To this end, he reinstated by force all the members of parliament who had been excluded in Pride's Purge of 1648, thus reconstituting the last undeniably legitimate English parliament. The one and only action of this parliament was to dissolve itself, and call for free and open elections; the first in England in two decades. Prior to first meeting of this new parliament, Charles II issued the Declaration of Breda (April 1660), promising a general pardon for crimes committed during the English Civil War, and the payment of pay arrears to members of the army, as well as voluntarily accepting restrictions on his powers subject to parliament, if he were restored to the throne. A month later, the new parliament proclaimed Charles II Stuart (1660-1685) king of England, Wales, Scotland, and Ireland. As promised, he pardoned all offences committed since 1637, exception with the agreement of parliament for one. The 58 men who had signed the death warrant on Charles I were to be hunted down and executed. 24 had already died, and most fled the country into exile, but 13 were executed. The corpse of Oliver Cromwell himself was exhumed from Westminster Abbey and hanged-drawn-and-quartered. His head was stuck on a pole on top of the Houses of Parliament, where it remained for twenty-five years. Rise of the Dutch Russian Expansion Boris Godunov (1585-1605), who succeeded Ivan the Terrible, first as regent and then as Tsar in his own right, remained well in control of Russia despite his lack of legitimacy, until the appearance of the first so-called '''False Dmitry' in 1604. Poland felt inclined to interfere in Russian affairs, coaching a defrocked Russian monk to pretend to be the youngest son of Ivan the Terrible and the rightful heir to the throne; the real Dmitry had in fact been exiled and died during an epileptic seizure in 1591. The pretender acquired growing support among the disaffected nobles and Cossacks, peasants who had escaped from serfdom to a nomadic life. The False Dmitry failed to convince the nobles in Moscow, but with the death of Boris Godunov in 1605 and assassination of his son two months later, Russia descended into chaos. The first supposed Dmitry was assassinated in May 1606, but the rebels produced a second Dmitry and when he was killed, a third; a scene reminiscent to the reign of Henry VII Tudor of England. The anarchy became known as the "Time of Troubles", and soon Russia's neighbours hoped to turn it to their advantage. One rebel faction invited a Polish army into Russia in 1610, and another faction invited a Swedish army. The growing crisis at last persuaded the Russian nobles to agree on a candidate for the throne. Michael Romanov, the seventeen year old great nephew of Ivan's first wife Anastasia, was brought out of hiding in a monastery, and crowned Tsar Michael I Romanov (1613-45); the Romanov dynasty would rule Russia until the Russian Revolution. The reigns of Michael and his son Alexis (1645-76) were notable chiefly for the restoration of stability, peace and prosperity, and for the expansion of Russian territory. In the west, the Ukraine was seized from Poland including Kiev. But the major expansion was in the East, where the whole of Siberia was occupied with astonishing speed. The Tsars enlisted the Cossacks for the task; fighting had become their profession, and would remain so even when they were granted land. The pattern was for Cossack bands to press into new regions of Siberia, as yet occupied only by tribes of hunters, then establish fortified settlements, and demand tribute for Moscow from the local people. Often tribute was in furs, which became a major part of Russia's trade with Europe. At the start of the Romanov era, there were Russian outposts as far as the Yenisei river, 1750 miles east of Moscow. By 1649, the Pacific coast had been reach, an advance of another 1750 miles. From the start, the Russian authorities found a secondary use for Siberia, as a place of enforced exile in appalling conditions. Some of the first to suffer this very Russian punishment were victims of Russia's own mini Reformation during the 17th century; the Schism of the Old Believers. The Russian Reformation aimed to correct Church practices wherever they had deviated over the centuries from the Byzantine Orthodox example. In our secular age, the errors seem trivial; crossing oneself with two fingers rather than three, or icons which show the holy figures in an incorrect manner. The third Romanov tsar, Peter the Great, would bring Russia to even greater heights, transforming the country into a great European power. Habsburg Spain in Decline The reign of Philip II (1556-98), who sent the Spanish Armada against England proved the zenith of Spanish power. The uniting of the thrones of Spain and Portugal in 1580, brought together Europe’s two great overseas empires. The Castilian nobles’ led a quite comfortable existence, but disdained commerce and industry, allowing foreign merchants to dominate trade. Money that didn’t find its way into foreign pockets, or wasn’t owed for European wars, went towards building churches, monasteries, and palaces. 17th-century Spain was like a gigantic artisans’ workshop. The age was immortalised: on canvas by artists such as Velázquez, El Greco, Zurbarán and Murillo; in words by Miguel de Cervantes the author of Western Europe's first great novel, Don Quixote; and the prolific playwrights Lope de Vega and Calderón. The reigns of Philip III (1598-1621) and his son Philip IV (1621-65) marked the steady decline in Spain's prestige and prosperity, compounded by chronic inflation prompted by the influx of silver from the Americas, and her costly involvement in the Thirty Years' War to no great benefit. Both kings handed over affairs of state to self-serving favourites. Portugal was lost to the crown for good in 1640, in an almost bloodless revolution sweeps. Meanwhile, the Spanish monarchy was creating a problem for their royal line through the constant intermarrying within the House of Habsburg, becoming dangerously inbred. Three successive generations of Spanish kings had Habsburgs as both parents; Philip III, Philip IV and Charles II. The famous Habsburg jaw, prominent in Philip IV, was so extreme in Charles II (1665-1700) that it amounted to a disability; one of many, for he was sickly from birth. During the reign of Charles II, Spain was essentially left leaderless and was gradually being reduced to a second-rank power. He married twice but had no children, and was assumed to be impotent. In his thirties he was so often ill, that his early death was widely expected, with the coming crisis obsessing Europe throughout the 1690s. The Habsburg dynasty became extinct in Spain with Charles II's death in 1700, and the War of the Spanish Succession ensued in which the other European powers tried to assume control of the Spanish monarchy. European Rivals in the Far East With the decline of Spain and the union of the Iberian Crowns (1580–1640), the Portuguese monopoly on the long trade route round Africa to the Far East was vulnerable to other European powers. The Treaty of Tordesillas, which the Spanish and Portuguese claimed divided the world between them, proved of little consequence; no other European nation had agreed to it. It was the Dutch really broke that power and briefly became the world’s foremost naval and commercial nation. The Dutch East India Company was founded in 1602, with a tax-free monopoly on eastern trade for 21 years and extensive powers to deprive Portugal of her spice trade. in 1619, Batavia in Java was established as the capital of the Dutch Empire. The Portuguese were driven out of Malacca by 1641 and from Sri Lanka by 1658. The main focus of Dutch attention was Indonesia, known as the Spice Islands, the source of the most valuable spice of all, cloves, coveted as a flavour in food, as a preservative, as a mild anaesthetic, as an ingredient in perfume, even to mask stinking breath. They established control over the trade in cloves and also nutmeg with ruthless efficiency, eradicating clove trees on all the islands except two and taking strict measures to ensure that plants were not exported. The Cape of Good Hope became a very important port of call for taking on water and fresh supplies, and in 1652 began to establish a successful settlement there. The Dutch also took on and oust from the Spice Islands, another European nation attempting to get a foothold in the region; the English East India Company. The English had been the first to adopt this approach in 1600, but their Dutch competitor was initially by far the more successful. However, in depriving the English of the Spice Islands, the Dutch unwittingly did them a favour, with the English East India Company deciding to concentrate its efforts on India. In fact the English and Dutch as often cooperated, such as in the destruction of Portuguese Hormuz on the Persian Gulf in 1622. The English had established a factory in Surat in eastern India by 1613; a factory was a secure warehouse for the accumulation of Indian textiles, spices and indigo. Surat remained the English headquarters on the west coast of India, until gradually eclipsed by Bombay in the 1690s; Bombay was acquired by Charles II in 1661 as part of the dowry of his Portuguese bride. Meanwhile the English were establishing secure footholds on the east coast, with Fort St George at Madras constructed between 1640 and 1644. By 1668, the French joined the English in India with a number of settlements including Pondicherry and Chandernagore. France probably could have become the leading European colonial power in the 17th and 18th centuries. It had the largest population and wealth, the best army and for a time the strongest navy under Louis XIV. Yet with an intense preoccupation with European affairs, France pursued a spasmodic overseas policy. England, France’s ultimately successful rival, freed somewhat of such European entanglements by the English Channel pursued her overseas policy with a single-minded intensity; limiting her involvement in a string of European conflicts from the Nine Years' War to the War of Spanish Succession, from the War of Austrian Succession to Seven Years’ War, while using these conflicts as pretext to disencumber her rivals of their overseas colonies. European Rivals in the Americas The spectacular conquests of the Spanish in the Americas, first in the Caribbean and then Mexico and Peru, captured the imagination and the envy of the European world. Throughout the 16th centuries, the British, French, Dutch, and other European nations were regularly crossing the Atlantic for exploration and privateering activities, as well as for the rich fishing off the coast. The first successful permanent settlement in North America, outside Spanish Mexico and Florida, was the English colonial venture sponsored by James I at Jamestown, Virginia, although only after the most appalling difficulties. In April 1607, three ships sent out by the London Company sailed into Chesapeake Bay with 100 English settlers, and select an island to settle on. A year later disease, hunger, and local Indian attack had reduced their number to less than 40. But the hardship produced the first notable leader in British colonial history, John Smith, who soon became involved in a famously romance with the daughter of a local chieftain, Pocahontas. More settlers reached Jamestown in 1609 bringing the colony to about 500, only for a devastating winter of famine to reduce the settlers to sixty. Yet the settlers persevered. Meanwhile, the most famous boatload of immigrants in North American history left Plymouth in September 1620. The Pilgrim Fathers were part of a Puritan group who want religious freedom in a place of their own; their example of self-reliance became a central strand in the American ideal. In December 1620, December the little group of 102 select a coastal site suitable for their village, that they name Plymouth, New England. Only about half the group survived that first severe winter, but after the first harvest in November 1621, the Pilgrims celebrate a ceremony of Thanksgiving for nature's bounty, with the local Indians sharing in this first annual celebration. A large indigenous fowl, the turkey, making an admirable centrepiece. The example of self-reliance of the Pilgrim Fathers became a central strand in the American ideal. The success of the Jamestown and Plymouth settlers soon caused others to follow their example. Massachusetts was settled in 1630, and its appeal proved so great that by 1640 had some 20,000 settlers arrived from England. As populations grew and colonisation extended further afield, regions evolved into separate colonies; Maryland established 1632, Rhode Island in 1636, Connecticut emerged in 1662, Carolina in 1663, Delaware in 1664, and so on. For all their professed dreams of religious freedom, the North American colonies inherited the same self-righteous religious intolerance of Europe, with Rhode Island emerging as an exception; a haven that welcomed persecuted sects. By 1650, the English colonies had a population of 50,000. Meanwhile, the region to the south-west of English New England, was being colonised by the Dutch. In 1624, a party of thirty families was sent out to establish a colony in the area of the Hudson River. They made their first permanent settlement at Albany and named the region New Netherland. In 1626, the governor of the small colony purchased the island of Manhattan from the local Indians for 60 guilders worth of trade goods, and named it New Amsterdam. The Dutch generally found it easier to make money through piracy, but New Amsterdam thrived as an exceptionally well placed seaport. Yet it was surrounded by English colonies, and seemed to the English both an anomaly and an extremely desirable possession. The English had few qualms about conflict with the her fellow Protestant neighbour, and between 1652 and '89 fought a series of wars with little pretext other than commercial advantage. When an English fleet arrives in New Amsterdam in 1664, the Dutch governor accepted the reality of the situation and surrenders the territory without a shot being fired. It was renamed New York after the brother of Charles II, the Duke of York, and coastal regions further south recently settled by the Dutch was named New Jersey. Further north, the French founded Quebec in 1608. However, in contrast the English colonies, their main focus was not farming but fur-trapping, especially beaver, which was done through alliances with local Indian tribes. Thus New France quickly covered an immense area, but the population only grew slowly; by 1635 the settlers in Quebec numbered fewer than 100. Montreal was founded in 1648, but still by 1660 there were about 2,300 Frenchmen in North America, when the English colonies were reaching 75,000. During the 16th century, pirate vessels from many European nations preyed on rich Spanish fleets in the waters of the Caribbean. The islands themselves remained an exclusively Spanish preserve, but they were too numerous for the Spaniards to control them all for long. The first British settlement on the islands was the result of an accident. Castaways from an vessel wrecked en route to Virginia in 1609, found safety on Bermuda. The British also established settlements on Barbados (1627), Antigua, Nevis and Montserrat (1636), and Bahamas (by 1648), the site of Columbus' first landfall in the New World but since then mostly deserted. Hard on their heels, the French occupied part of St Kitts (1627), Dominica (1632), and Martinique and Guadeloupe (1635). Soon Spain would lose two large sections of the central Caribbean to her European rivals. An English fleet invaded and captured Jamaica in 1655, and in 1664 France occupied the western half of Hispaniola; modern day Haiti. Yet in South America, the Spanish and Portuguese proved far more hostile to other European colonies, with French and Dutch interlopers restricted to the region of Guiana; Dutch Suriname (1616), and French Guiana (1643). There they survived as small-scale slave-based sugar plantation colonies. Category:Historical Periods